Clearer laws needed on online speech, says Microsoft’s Nadella
SAN FRANCISCO: Microsoft Corp chief executive officer Satya Nadella said social-media services like Facebook, Twitter and Youtube need clearer laws and rules to govern whether controversial accounts, like former US President Donald Trump’s, have a place on their services, rather than being asked to make freespeech decisions themselves.
“Unilateral action by individual companies in democracies like ours is just not long-term stable—we do need to be able to have a framework of laws and norms,” Nadella said in a wideranging interview with Bloomberg Television’s Emily Chang. “Depending on any one individual CEO in any one of these companies to make calls that are going to really help us maintain something as sacred and as important as our democracy in the long run is just no way that at least I, as a citizen, would advocate for.”
Microsoft doesn’t currently run a consumer social media service, but it is among cloudcomputing providers that have been pulled into the debate over the deplatforming of certain individual voices, social-media accounts and entire apps, especially following the violent pro
Trump riot at the US Capitol last month. Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud unit pulled its hosting services from Parler LLC, a social network that touts itself as anticensorship and was popular among conservative and extremist figures. Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google previously had removed Parler from their app stores. The three tech companies’ actions essentially took the service offline. Trump’s account, meantime, was banned from Twitter Inc. and remains suspended on Facebook Inc.
In the past several years, antitrust regulators have ramped up investigations into the market power of large technology companies, just as Microsoft fell under government scrutiny and faced a US antitrust lawsuit more than two decades ago, when Nadella was a rising manager.